


Possible Worlds

by Miss_M



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Death, F/M, Family, Gen, M/M, Multiverse, Non-Linear Narrative, Parallel Universes, Sexual Content, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-29 20:07:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5140883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust in the multiverse. None of the possibilities are very good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Possible Worlds

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing.

Rust’s pop doesn't come back from ‘Nam, or so his ma claims. 

The women in ma’s church group say his father was a hero, but Rust doesn’t see it, he’s five years old and he doesn’t know what ‘hero’ means. He never figures it out, what made his pop special, a kid who got drafted and wasn’t smart enough to cross over to Mexico. Kid who left his life rotting on the jungle floor or tangled up in mangrove roots, his soul turned to a poisonous adder or a chattering monkey. 

His ma would prefer a hero’s son, someone dashing and vapid, but Rust grows up silent and watchful, a little judge. 

When she’s drunk and fighting with one of her boyfriends, ma accuses Rust of spying on her. At least she never reaches for the oldest insult, “You’re just like your father.” She barely knew Rust’s father, a quick screw in a backseat or a motel, and then gone. A ghost fathered him.

Years later, after he and his ma are barely speaking except over the phone on meaningless days which mark births and other greeting-card exchanges, Rust looks up his pop in the system.

Travis Cohle came back from ‘Nam, passed through Texas and kept right on going, did time in Alaska for armed robbery, died of liver cirrhosis midway through his sentence. 

Rust doesn’t inform his mother of this, suspects she already knew, somehow, without ever having spoken to Rust’s father after he shipped out. It hardly seems to matter, leave your bones in a festering pile of vegetation and blood or in a potter’s field under the broad Alaskan sky.

Rust never visits Alaska. He thinks about it, reads up about it. In the end he prefers to imagine how big the stars must be so far north and away from urban light pollution. He lets his pop lie and decompose in silence and peace.

***

The anticipated call comes from the old folks’ home: neutral voice, beige sympathy, meaningless condolence.

Knowing the time and date of his mother’s passing does not give Rust closure. There is no closure. There be dragons and storms and quick tangles in the dark. Fleeting connections. Easier and sharper if he could stay an island unto himself. 

They never liked each other, but his mother stays with him till the end.

***

The green Pontiac jumps the curb and stops halfway across their lawn, sod churned up by its front wheels and Sophia’s red plastic sand bucket crushed under it. Claire took Sophia inside for her nap not five minutes earlier. The girl kicked and wailed in protest, now she’s at the window, mouth open and eyes like marbles as she watches her father wrench open the Pontiac’s front door.

Rust breaks two of the man’s ribs, gives him a shiner the size of an orange. Drunken idiot could have killed someone. 

Claire removes the bit of squashed red plastic while Rust sits in lockup and his colleagues convince the driver against bringing him up on assault charges. Rust knows that Claire knows that he couldn’t have brought himself to touch Sophia’s ruined toy. Claire never mentions it, buys a new bucket at the mall the next day, a blue one.

When the hours Rust puts in at work and all the shit he brings home and hoards like a fucking chipmunk waiting for winter finally tear them apart, they argue about a lot of things but never about that day. Claire was horrified and grateful to see her husband whaling on the man who could have killed Sophia. Rust is grateful and resentful that Claire never said anything about it, after.

Divorce means you retread the same ground again and again, and you never really let anything go.

Sophia avoids speaking to either of them, wrapped up in her own misery. 

***

Sophia grows up tall, smart, beautiful like her mother, sometimes moody like her father but nothing too bad.

Pot and blow in her system, track marks on her smooth inner thighs. Smart kid, cop’s kid. Knows ( _knew_ ) how to hide herself, no breadcrumb trail to follow, no obvious masks to lift.

Rust goes to identify her, her face slashed by the windshield, her skin already waxy, the tone and texture of cement dust. She was due to start at Ole Miss next month. Rust nods to the coroner, procedure is procedure, and he thinks about straight razors, telephone poles, how much China White it would take to kill him quick and does he have enough cash on him. He’d rather not face Claire after this. He’d rather not. 

***

He fucks his partner one night while high, while Crash. He doesn’t hold back when he’s Crash. He calculates, weighs, but he doesn’t say no to anything. No could get him killed. He has to keep going and all it takes is a little too much to make him very stupid and very dead. No means his hands would go on shaking, vibrating like zithers, and he needs to sleep, he needs to come and sleep and not think, just for a little bit.

Marty lets him, he’s pretty sure, but he never can decide for certain. There’s blood, after, on the sheets and Marty’s knuckles and swaggering signet ring. Rust puts some ice on his cheekbone, scoops it right up and holds it in his bare hand, numb and wet while Marty drives. They do not speak.

They don’t speak except when Marty gets drunk at work and tries to provoke Rust into another round. Words intended to land like a switchblade’s short, sharp thrusts, once spoken they’re more farts than jabs. Marty’s petulant, self-righteous whine reaches back into the past and scoops out only the memory of his thin grunts while Rust gripped his hips and pounded him, no remorse or care in the world. Nothing more.

Rust quits less than six months later. Fuck Marty and his perpetual whining, this ain’t about him. A saint wouldn’t have lasted longer than six months as Steve Geraci’s partner, and Rust wasn’t cursed with that kind of patience.

***

Ginger isn’t burdened with brains and he can be mighty insistent when he wants to. No, they’ll hit the stash house some other night. They’ll talk to Crash’s people in San Marcos soon. Miles wants to see Crash first.

Rust can smell it, like greasy ash and diesel, but what choice does he have? Push back too hard and get killed in this biker bar, Marty’ll never know what happened to him, or go along with what Ginger says and make like he doesn’t see the twitch in Ginger’s right hand, a tell which would have buried him at the poker table. 

Rust sees the bullet coming from a long way away, like sunlight reflected on the windshield of a car coming toward him across the Texas flatlands. 

Miles makes it quick, at least, no sadist, him. Rust hopes Miles makes that little prick Ginger dig the hole in which to bury him. A bantam rooster’s job, scratching in the dirt, while men like Miles rule the world. 

***

He feels neither warm nor cold, the pain is too intense for that. Like Errol Childress peeled off his skin, left his ripe flesh exposed for the flies. The world’s stench follows him down the dim gray path. 

He bleeds out on Marty’s knobby knees and the packed-earth floor of Carcosa. Another one of its sad ghosts. 

***

Laurie wants to get married. Laurie wants a house. Laurie wants a baby.

Rust goes along with it because fighting with Laurie is like punching a pillow, deeply unsatisfying and inconclusive, and if he gives her what she wants at least she’ll be happy for a little while. 

He doesn’t think about it much, but once the nurse offers him the baby to hold, he lets the truth come over him all at once. He tells the nurse no, walks out of the hospital, doesn’t look back.

Marty berates him, Maggie looks at him in sorrow then looks away. Laurie wraps herself around the baby like a crown of thorns, names it Randall after her father. Rust hates the name, but it’s not his lookout anymore.

There never was any other way but out. 

***

When he runs out of cash, Rust finds work on a fishing crew with an alcoholic captain who’s not so much a hypocrite to quibble about Rust’s private vices. 

The wind drowns out the crew’s shouts when Rust climbs up on deck in a gathering squall. He wraps his elbow around a greasy chain, the spray so cold he cannot feel his face or his fingers. He cannot see or hear, better than morphine or booze or any sweet dream he had while his daughter lived and he was still a person. 

He thinks about the lost children, the ones who got tossed in bayous and flooded creeks, and how unfit he is to go with them. This won’t be his last thought, because he’s still too bloody-minded and weak to let go of that chain, lean into the wind and let the squall take him. Water cold as diamonds drips on his lips from his moustache, neither salty nor acid.

***

They split up, so Rust is the one who finds the room full of flies, the dead boy and unmoving girl. 

Rust is the one who gets Reggie Ledoux to talk, forces Ledoux’s own gun into his mouth. The blast covers up the teeth Rust broke. 

Rust takes the reprimand for not cuffing the suspect before he could snatch up his gun and take the chicken-shit way out. Nobody congratulates them for finding the children, nobody wants to deal with the story Ledoux told and Rust will not let go. Dog with a fucking bone. Marty’s metaphors as lazy as ever.

Edwin Tuttle stays bluff and placid in the face of Rust’s prodding, while Major Quesada evolves from irritated to damn near apoplectic. 

Someone’s been in his house. There’s a footprint under the window, wrong size to be Rust’s and pointing into the room, some of his books have been moved around. They didn’t go into his pop’s Army locker. A warning, the cage bars just rattled. 

Rust drinks bourbon and drives late at night, early in the morning, and knows it’s only a matter of time. They’ll pull him out of his crumpled car and declare it an accident, Rust’s own fault. If they want him, Rust will make them take the effort to come and get him. 

Marty will bluster a little, but he’ll settle, he’ll let it go after just enough time has passed for the world to register his protest but not give it traction. One cannot shame a shameless man, and Marty has the pack animal’s survival instinct, always has done.

***

When the meds-induced fog clears and he can think, Rust reckons he’d be better off wandering the streets with grime under his fingernails and his feet wrapped in newspapers, the prophet of truth with lice in his long hair and beard, than remanded indefinitely to the North Shore Psychiatric Hospital. 

A Cassandra haranguing uncaring humanity on Lubbock’s sunburned, cracked-pavement streets sounds about right. Too late now.

***

The state attorney is up for reelection and Rust’s boss is fed up with him, so Rust doesn’t get passed to the DEA, a sniffer dog on indefinite loan.

He gets prison for the guy he shot. Texas has the death penalty, but why bother injecting him with anything when he can just be a cop in gen pop.

Rust’s tough as an old boot, but there is always another wetback ‘banger, another Aryan, another Iron Crusader who can put two and two together, match Crash’s name to Rust’s face. They make sure he’s a long time dying.


End file.
